DLL Versioning

[trailway]

I want to begin doing incremental builds and start delivering Microsoft Patches (msp files) to my customers. One of the keys to making patches work is that the version number on the DLLs has to be incremented. I know that Visual Build has a nice capability to increment the version only if a build is otherwise required. Cool.

The version numbers are typically 4 digits, Major.Minor.Revision.Build. Normally, I would want to increment the 4th digit. If I have to deliver a build with only changes in the 4th digit then I would call this a hot fix.

When I have a set of fixes that I want to package into a Revision (or Service Pack) then what I want to do is to increment the 3rd digit the first time a DLL rebuild is required and then start incrementing the 4th digit.

For example let’s say that the DLL version is 1.2.3.4.
The next time it requires a rebuild it goes to 1.2.3.5, then 1.2.3.6, and so on.
If I decided to make a set of changes I am going to call a service pack then the next time it requires a rebuild, if any, it should go to 1.2.4.0, then 1.2.4.1, and so on.

Is this non-standard? I really just want to adopt standard best-practices.

Of course, I can just change the version number of all DLLs when I start a Service Pack but that touches every DLL, bloats the patch, and causes my customer to be concerned about the extent of the changes required.

FWIW, I have VB 6.0, VS 6.0 C++, VS 2008 C#, and VS 2008 VB.NET projects.